Hitler: Philosopher King

Hitler’s Aspergic personality and postmodern philosophy combined to enable both his personal political success and then the nature of the postmodern power state that he constructed, recreating a new culture and morality in order to yield the maximal amount of the only currency that survives the caustic deconstruction of postmodernism, namely power itself. More

Hitler and the NSDAP (Nazi party) are a social and historical phenomenon, Hitler’s Aspergic personality and postmodern philosophy combined to enable both his personal political success and then the postmodern power state that he constructed. By refracting the issues through leadership, psychiatric, sociological and philosophical disciplinary prisms, the hypothesis in this book proposes a synergy between Hitler's autistic leadership genius and the contemporaneously emergent radical postmodern ideas.

The collective insanity that seemed to sweep over the whole of the German nation with the Hitler phenomenon requires an additional explanation to the traditional version of the proud nation humiliated in Versailles. The extremity of the collective delusion, the racist, grandiose and murderous ideas of Hitler and the NSDAP that can emerge in small, paranoid, fanatic sects; these were adopted, embraced by, and then fought for by a whole nation, and perhaps the most educated, civilised, and cultured nation globally at that time. This phenomenon requires an explanation additional to the historical and structural accounts that currently prevail.

This book constructs such an explanation as a hypothesis; an account to bridge this conceptual gap. It argues that Hitler and the NSDAP as a phenomenon were different. Hitler and his NSDAP were not just another political party lead by another charismatic demagogue. Hitler and the NSDAP were a product of a unique moment in the cultural and philosophical evolution of human kind. Part of the tragedy of the Great War was the Generals catching up with the paradigm shift in the lethal effectiveness brought about by progress in the military technology. This thesis argues that the Hitler and NSDAP phenomenon was brought about by humanity as a whole catching up with the paradigm shift in the human condition brought about by the developments in philosophy and culture over the turn of the 19th and 20th century that later came to be known as postmodernism. Hitler and the NSDAP were able to opportunistically surf the tsunami of these new ideas as they crashed through western cultural givens and beliefs, allowing Hitler and the NSDAP to create their New Order in its wake.

Hitler was an Aspergic savant-genius in in his achievement of Chancellorship with a party that had 30 or 40 members a mere decade before; in the innovation of his political campaigns and strategies, then in his manipulation of other national leaders when he obtained a place on the world stage. On questions of values, ethics, relationships, the emotional and kinship bonds and cultural assumptions that comprises the fabric of societies and social groupings; on these issues he was an empty autistic vessel. But this was also a strength, in that he was able to reinvent a structure of ethics, value and assumptions, unencumbered by relationships, emotional ties, that would have given him pause in his pursuit of his aim.

Hitler's Asperger’s enabled him to single-mindedly pursue personal and political power. The postmodern state created did not rest on historical, religious or cultural traditions. Nietzsche’s crystallization of the previous century and a half of German idealism in a rigorous moral and cultural nihilism, could be reified and rolled out with Weberian bureaucratic and Prussian militaristic efficiency. Ideology could be shaped instrumentally in order to yield the maximal amount of the only currency that survives the caustic deconstruction of postmodernism, namely power itself

Mark Morris is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst living in the UK and working in the UK National Health Service in Cambridge as a Consultant Medical Psychotherapist. He trained in medicine and psychiatry in Glasgow, Scotland as the seventh generation through the University of Glasgow, although the others studied law. He moved to London in 1990 to train with the British Psychoanalytic Society and after training in the Cassel Hospital Richmond as a psychotherapist, he worked in the Charing Cross Gender Clinic and as a consultant in St Bernard's Hospital (the old Hanwell Asylum that housed Charlie Chaplains mother for a period) before moving to be the Director of Therapy in HMP Grendon, the internationally renown high secure prison treatment facility run as a set of therapeutic communities. Next he worked in the Tavistock/Portman clinic, another NHS forensic psychoanalytic unit before spending a decade in independent sector hospitals leading secure personality disorder units and hospitals, before returning to work in the NHS.

His research interests have revolved around the personality of leadership, an subject in which he completed research doctorate in Keele University, and continental philosophy, particularly phenomenology, with its overlap into understanding psychiatry and psychopathology. He has written mainly on psychotherapeutic issues pertaining to working with people with personalty disorder and antisocial personality to date. Approaching retirement, he plans to write more, so watch this space.